Is It Time For Apple To Update App Store Pricing Rules?

Ken Case is a nice guy, always polite whenever you speak to him. However, someone should do him a favor and tell him that after 5 years of Apple ignoring him, it's obvious he's in an abusive relationship and needs to get out.

OmniGroup was successful before the App Store, and based on the quality of their software, will remain so even if they quit the App Store.

> “Apple is certainly aware of our desire for upgrade pricing,” Case tells me. “It's something I've been asking for since before the launch of the original App Store in 2008. ... “Our relationship with Apple has always been great--and this certainly doesn't change that,” he says. “I don't think they're trying to work against our interests; they just have to decide where to focus their efforts, and our priorities are not always their priorities.”

Omni probably gets quite a bit of 'preferential treatment' from developer relations than the normal, average developer.

In the case of Apple, this probably includes dev relations actually answering their e-mails, getting advance access to new features before they're announced (Apple sometimes likes to get third party devs to showcase their apps at their keynotes), and being able to obtain WWDC tickets without having to go through the usual stampede.

I can understand why they wouldn't want to risk that by pulling all their apps from the App Store, and thus annoying Apple. Not saying it's right, just that I can understand.

How do you go from Apple not including a feature in the MAS (in this case, upgrade pricing) to "abusive relationship?" I and every other small Apple developer would really love some analytics capabilities in the app store, but we don't go around calling its absence "abusive" on Apple's part.

The MAS is just another sales channel and Apple doesn't force you to use it. It's not incumbent on them to add features just because some people want them.

It seems like IAP solves this problem. It might be a bit of a hack, but it would work. Not sure what the big deal is.

It's hyperbole sure. But the fact is that Apple's refusal to add upgrade pricing goes directly against Omni's entire raison d'être. They release exquisitely detailed and full-featured apps, and they've been doing so longer than any OS X developer since their roots are back in NeXT.

The current App Store pricing devalues software, it turns it into a disposable commodity to be purchased and discarded. Apple is willing to sacrifice it's own pro apps to this devalued future because that's not where it makes its money anyway and it has some major scar tissue from being held hostage by the likes of Microsoft and Adobe.

You can say it's just another distribution channel, but it's obvious that the App Store is the future, and is by far the most convenient and recommended channel and that will only increase over time. Comparing it to something that is easily provided by third-parties like analytics is to miss the fundamental connection: Omni makes the type of software that App Store pricing makes impossible to create and maintain over time. If this continues the ecosystem will dry up, and the type of pro users who love Omni's stuff will all disappear as well. It's a bitter pill to swallow because they love Apple's tech, but the writing may be on the wall.